CHAPTER X
EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY
The experiments of some of our cities in giving their children training which shall make them intelligent in all the activities of their life, including the important one of earning a living, furnish excellent examples of the best that is being done in industrial education. The cities chosen for description are Gary, Chicago, and Cincinnati. This book is not concerned with schools or courses which are designed simply to give the pupils control of one specialized field of knowledge; that is, which train people for the processes of one particular industry or profession. It is true that most of the experiments in industrial education tried so far in this country have taken the material offered by the largest skilled industries of the neighborhood for their basis, and as a result have trained pupils for one or more definite trades. But wherever the experiment has been prompted by a sincere interest in education and in the welfare of the community this has not been the object of the work. The interest of the teachers is not centered on the welfare of any one industry, but on the welfare of the young people of the community. If the material prosperity of a community is due almost entirely to one or two industries, obviously the welfare of the individuals of the community is very closely connected with those industries. Then the educational purpose of training the children to the most intelligent use of their own capabilities and of their environment, is most easily served by using these industries as the material for the strictly utilitarian part of this training. The problem of general public-school education is not to train workers for a trade, but to make use of the whole environment of the child in order to supply motive and meaning to the work.
In Gary this has been done more completely than in any other single place. Superintendent Wirt believes firmly in the value of muscular and sense training for children; and instead of arranging artificial exercises for the purpose, he gives children the same sort of things to do that occupy their parents and call for muscular skill and fine coördination in the business of everyday life. Every child in Gary, boy and girl, has before his eyes in school finely equipped workshops, where he may, as soon as he is old enough, do his share of the actual work of running and keeping in order the school buildings. All of the schools except one small one where there are no high school pupils, have a lunch room where the girls learn to cook, and a sewing room where they learn to make their own clothes; a printing shop, and carpenter, electrical, machine, pattern, forging, and molding shops, where boys, and girls if they wish, can learn how most of the things that they see about them every day are made. There are painting departments, and a metal working room, and also bookkeeping and stenography classes. The science laboratories help give the child some understanding of the principles and processes at work in the world in which he lives.
The money and space required to equip and run these shops are saved from an ordinary sized school budget by the “two school system” that has been described above, and by the fact that all the expense usually charged by a school to repairs and paid out to contractors, is spent on these shops and for the salaries of the skilled workmen who teach in them. The buildings are kept in better repair than where all the work is done during the summer vacation, because as soon as anything needs to be fixed the pupils who are working in the shop that does that kind of work get at the repairs under the direction of the teacher. These shops can not be considered in any way an unnecessary luxury because they are used also by the high school pupils who are specializing for one kind of work and by the night and summer school for their vocational classes. The school management says in regard to the success of this plan, “When you have provided a plant where the children may live a complete life eight hours a day in work, study, and play, it is the simplest thing imaginable to permit the children in the workshops, under the direction and with the help of well-trained men and women, to assume the responsibility for the equipment and maintenance of the school plant. An industrial and commercial school for every child is thus provided without extra cost to the taxpayers.”
Learning moulding, and manufacturing school equipment. (Gary, Ind.)
The first three grades spend one hour a day in manual training and drawing, which take the form of simple hand-work and are not done in the shops, but in an especially equipped room with a trained teacher. The pupils draw, do painting and clay modeling, sewing and simple carpentry work. The five higher grades spend twice as much time on manual training and drawing. The little children go into the shops as helpers and watchers, much as they go into the science laboratories, and they pick up almost as much theory and understanding of processes as the older children possess. The art work and simpler forms of hand-work are kept up for the definite training in control and technique that comes from carrying through a problem independently. Because the small child’s love of creating is very great, they continue until the pupils are old enough to choose what shop they will go into as apprentices to the teacher. Since sixth grade children are old enough and strong enough to begin doing the actual work of repairing and maintaining the building, in this grade they cease to be watchers and helpers and become real workers. Distributing school supplies, keeping the school records and taking care of the grounds are done by the pupils under the direction of the school office or the botanical laboratory, and constitute a course in shop work just as much as does painting or repairing the electric lights. The school heat and power plant is also a laboratory for the pupils, in which they learn the principles of heating and lighting in a thoroughly practical way because they do much of the work connected with keeping the plant running.
The shop and science courses of the schools last only a third of the year, and there is a shorter probation course of five weeks. The pupils choose with the advice of their teachers what shop course they will take; if at the end of five weeks they do not like it they may change. They must change twice during the year. In this way the work can not lose its educational character and become simply a method of making juvenile factory hands to do the school repairs. Taking three shop courses in one school year results in giving the pupil merely a superficial knowledge of the theory and processes of any one kind of work. But this is as it should be, for the pupils are not taking the courses to become carpenters, or electricians, or dressmakers, but to find out how the work of the world is done. Moving as they do from one thing to another they learn as much of the theory of the industry as children of their age can understand, while an all-around muscular and sense training is insured. To confine the growing child too long to the same kind of muscular activity is harmful both mentally and physically; to keep on growing he must have work which exercises his whole body, which presents new problems, keeps teaching him new things, and thus develops his powers of reasoning and judgment. Any manual labor ceases to be educative the moment it becomes thoroughly familiar and automatic.